Saturday, July 16, 2011

Failed Leadership

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.

It's never going to be Virginia in 1743, monors!

The bodyguard who assassinated President Hamid Karzai’s brother had been working closely with US Special Forces and the CIA before he was recruited by the Taliban, raising fears over the Islamist movement’s increasingly sophisticated intelligence apparatus which has managed to threaten the inner circles of power in Afghanistan.

Sardar Mohammad, who shot Ahmed Wali Karzai at his home in Kandahar City on Tuesday, also held regular meetings with British officials, and had two brothers-in-law serving in a CIA-run paramilitary unit, the Kandahar Strike Force, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

They don’t get it because they don’t care to. That’s all there is.

The flag of Afghanistan until 2001, with the Shahada

Create a huge base, make a deal with ONE of the nations to the north to supply it, and make the base DRONE CENTRAL. Or fly them from a CVN … we HAVE to keep SEVERAL aircraft carrier groups out there anyway.

THE TECHNOLOGY DRIVEN OIL BOOM? This surge in domestic production would leave Iran, Kuwait and the Arab emirates combined in the rear-view mirror”

Here is one of the keys of a balanced budget, debt paydown, and possibly a commodity based export binge yo offset our prodigious appetite for ‘stuff’ made at below american labor costs overseas. Bit the threat is that the Van Jones’s appointed by the Obamas who view every scientific turn, every press break, every foreign development as another COMPULSORY opportunity to advance the socialist agenda they view as the ultimate good, which necessarily required the END OF THE REPUBLIC AS WE KNOW IT. This means impossible to afford solutions, and abnegation of any benefit such as cheaper energy which would prolong the system of the founders, and embracing any science which insists on unattainable and unaffordable, chic boutique baloney which accelerates the decline of propertied, capitalistic, selfish, arrogant, flawed, America…this is NOT about science, economics, or the real lives of people. If we are prevented from getting our own oil for our own and our children’s GREAT benefit, nomatter their color or economic strata these people will have shown themselves to be a DANGER TO THE REPUBLIC

A US oil boom — unless greens abort it

By ARTHUR HERMAN

Last Updated:3:58 AM, July 14, 2011

Posted:10:38 PM, July 13, 2011

Just a year after the BP oil spill, America is on the verge of a new golden era of oil exploration and production — unless President Obama and his environmentalist friends get their way.

This surge in domestic production would leave Iran, Kuwait and the Arab emirates combined in the rear-view mirror.

The US drilling boom rests on a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to open shale-oil reserves. It’s why wells are springing up in places like North Dakota, California and Pennsylvania, with thousands of new jobs in their wake.

Fracking has also opened up supplies of natural gas, sending prices plummeting. Now, even New York’s regulators have recommended lifting the state’s ban on the fossil-fuel gold rush that’s pushed North Dakota’s unemployment rate to 3.2 percent — the lowest in the nation.

The irony is that Obama had hoped higher oil prices would make us all drive electric cars and install backyard windmills. Instead, they’re making it profitable for US companies to expand the hunt for new reserves and to use fracking to reopen old ones.

Just last month, Exxon-Mobil announced the discovery of a vast field in the Gulf of Mexico, with as many as 700 million barrels waiting to be tapped. Other companies are using fracking to return to the Texas basin, the center of US oil production in the 1930s — which will mean millions in investment and thousands of jobs for that state. Montana and North Dakota are sitting on a shale-oil formation that could yield nearly 4 billion barrels.

Not many Americans realize we are already the world’s No. 3 oil producer, at 7.5 million barrels a day. The coming boom should add another 1.5 million by 2015. That’s closing in on Saudi Arabia’s daily total.

And oil-shale rich Canada could surpass Iran’s barrel-per-day output in a few years — so we’re looking at a major shift in the geopolitics of oil.

Easy-to-find oil is running out in the Mideast. After deliberately wrecking a multibillion-dollar deal with BP, Russia — the world’s biggest oil and gas producer — is looking more and more like a bad bet for foreign investors. If you want to make money in the oil biz, America will be the place to go.

But the environmental lobby is bent on preventing it — waging an all-out war on fracking, claiming (against all evidence) that it contaminates ground water. The ideologues hope to use memories of the BP spill and a more recent one on the Yellowstone River to dam up all exploration and pipeline construction.

Never mind that fracking goes on thousands of feet below groundwater sources, and that Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling did more damage to the Gulf economy than the BP spill ever did — or that the Yellowstone accident has affected an area of less than 10 miles on the edge of a national park of 3,500 square miles.

The promise of prosperity and jobs was enough to get even a blue state like New York to ignore the green lobby’s fearmongering. But Obama may yet derail the boom.

The president has had the oil industry’s two most important tax incentives — the percentage-depletion allowance and the deduction for intangible-drilling costs — in his cross hairs for a long time.

Both help oil and drilling companies recoup the heavy capital investment they need to look for oil, even when they turn up nothing. The White House argues that we must end both “tax breaks for Big Oil” to close the budget deficit.

This is nonsense. Manhattan Institute oil guru Robert Bryce notes that the entire value of the industry’s tax advantage comes to $4.4 billion a year. The notion that scrapping tax abatements that have been around since the 1920s will put a dent in a deficit of $1.4 trillion is laughable — and dangerous.

Besides, those few billions in savings would be washed away in rising oil prices if the impending rebirth of the US oil industry is aborted.

So there’s more at stake in the debt-ceiling impasse than just how we pay for our government. It’s also about whether America will dictate its own energy and economic future — or whether it’s left in the hands of sheiks, dictators and the EPA.

Philippines: Govt to fund Muslim education

The program has three components: Arabic Language and Islamic Values Education (ALIVE) in public schools, ALIVE for out-of-school Muslim youths and adults, and assistance to private madaris (schools for higher religious education).

Of the funds released, 173.25 million pesos will go to the office of the education secretary while 78.35 million pesos will be released directly to school division offices to cover the allowances of Muslim teachers.

The Astounding Hypocrisy of Barack Obama

Hat tip to Mike's America for the following video of Obama's remarks to the House GOP Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 29, 2010:

Mike comments:

Since then, Republicans won big in the November 2010 election and came back to Congress with multiple plans to address the budget, debt and entitlements. The response from Obama and the Democrats has been to demagogue GOP plans using every scare tactic in the book, like pushing Grandma off the cliff, and even some new ones (like Obama's veiled threat to withhold Social Security checks).

These kinds of inconsistencies in Obama's past and present statements need to be brought to the fore.

How Many Americans Believe This?

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) used the race card this afternoon to assess blame in the debt ceiling fight. Jackson Lee, a black Congresswoman, believes the disagreement over raising the debt ceiling is because of President Obama's race.

Just Fishin' ?

When my 2 oldest daughters (and I) were younger I sometimes took them fishin' with me. They couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 or 6 or 7. Pictures of them in fishin' hats and denim jackets, pole and tackle box in hand, looking like "what are we letting him get us into this time?"

We'd sit on the banks of the mighty Manatawny Creek drowning worms and minnows, hoping to land a nice rainbow or brown trout, but usually coming up with a bunch of sunnies and crappies.

That didn't matter because we told their mom fish stories about the one that got away anyhow.

One of my fondest, vividest memories from then was the day we were sitting there, having just checked once again to be sure their worms were still wiggling on the hook. I had just poured a hot cup of coffee, turned back to the creek and heard a "plop" in my cup.

I looked up in the tree and muttered "Oh you dirty bird."

I thought they'd fall into the creek laughing.

So when daughter #1 sent me this song for Father's Day it meant more than she knew.

Now she and her husband are regularly catching salmon and flounder and halibut so big they would consider the largest fish I ever caught bait.

Friday, July 15, 2011

However, the USA has defaulted before, and guess who it was?

As America’s politicians battle over the government’s debt ceiling, the US Treasury is thundering that a failure to raise the limit puts the nation on course to “default on its legal obligations – an unprecedented event in American history”. Alarming, but not quite correct.

The US has technically defaulted on its debt – failed to meet its payment obligations to holders of its Treasuries – as recently as 1979. The cause? Problems with the office equipment as deadlines approached, according to officials, which left a relatively tiny amount of debt repayments unmet for a few weeks.

Nonetheless, academics think the blip wreaked permanent damage, raising red flags as to the impact of current political wrangling.

Back in 1979, mirroring today’s events, Republicans were refusing to allow President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, to raise the US debt ceiling. Then, the row was over raising it to $830bn, today, the question is whether to lift the $14.3 trillion limit (inflation, of course, has helped swell the figure).

The angry investors did eventually get their money, with back interest, and those holding debt maturing on May 17 were paid on time. US officials said what had happened could not even be classed as a default, merely a delay.

The approval to raise the debt ceiling did come at the last minute, but amid all the drama the cheques did not get written. In all, the US Treasury failed to pay around $120m to investors expecting their dues for Treasuries maturing on April 26, May 3 and May 10 that year.

Unfortunately, markets do not tend to care much about such niceties. A much-referenced academic paper, The Day the United States Defaulted on Treasury Bills, says the result of the technical default was a “one-time, permanent ratchet upward of yields” – the rates of return demanded by investors to hold the US’s debt.

“All other investors are a little bit weary of you, going forward,” Terry Zivney, one of the paper’s authors, explained in a recent interview. “Maybe next the time they’ll be the person that doesn’t get their $120m.”

Officials blamed a breakdown of word-processing equipment as they scrambled to prepare the cheques and the large numbers of small investors involved, which made the situation trickier.

The Parallel Government
Of The Entire World

All of us, every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth were born with the same unalienable rights; to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if the governments of the world can't get that through their thick skulls, then, regime change will be necessary.

Infidel Babe Of The Week
Can it be anyone else?

IBA Quote of the Week.

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."

The Infidel Bloggers Alliance Radio Show

Gathering Storm Report Radio Show

"An Islamic regime must be serious in every field," explained Ayatollah Khomeini. "There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam."

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"I want to be very, very clear, however: I understand and agree with the analysis of the problem. There is an imminent threat. It manifested itself on 9/11. It's real and grave. It is as serious a threat as Stalinism and National Socialism were. Let's not pretend it isn't."~~~~~Bono~~~~~